Greedy Goblin

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Kill 10 mogus

There are various gaming skills that one can practice while having fun. If you like to test your reaction time, FPS games are for you. If you like combination and thinking, chess is there for you. MMOs aren't the best for this as they don't provide instant action. I think chess would be much less popular if you had to level to 90 before your first match by killing about 10000 pawns, first with your pawn, then by your rook, bishop and finally queen.

MMOs are perfect for those who enjoy optimization. There is a task that isn't hard but lengthy and by being smart you can speed it up by large. You combinate, practice, read up and your speed improves. I love to optimize and pretty good in it. You can see that from very simple basic actions (buy an implant in Jita, haul it to Rens and sell it) I can conjure up a working system that makes me extremely rich in games.

As I said, I play World of Warcraft - Mists of Pandaria, mostly for the story-graphics content. But my wish to optimize things caught on me. I quickly figured out that Tol Barad still gives the best honor/hour if you win in 5-15 mins, and honor gear is the easiest way to improve your ilvl to raid finder level. I also found out how can you do all the Golden Lotus dailies in 10-15 mins, netting like 1000 rep and 40 valor point, making this a faster VP source than running "heroics" even with a competent team.

I enjoyed playing WoW doing these. But the constant news stream don't even let me forget the big picture: I optimize for nothing. The optimal way of getting higher ilvl gear is simply logging out for a month. When you log back, you get it for free. Everything that I could earn now will be baseline stuff in the next patch and even until then there will be hotfixes to make it trivially easy to get. For example the mentioned Golden Lotus quests get some "developer attention".

In EVE everything I get is mine until I lose it by being bad in the game. My Orca will be just as useful a year from now as it is now, the only way to lose it is to fly it to Rancer or something. Caldari Navy standings won't get obsolete like Baradin Wardens. But in WoW the general rule is that everyone must get everything. The raid content I want to see and farm gear for will be completed by literally AFK people in a few weeks when players run out of votekick charges.

I canceled my WoW subscription. Unfortunately I had a 6-month plan so I'm paid until late December. You know what was the most shocking? Upon cancelation there is a questionaire wanting to know why I'm leaving. Half of the options were various wording of "the game is too hard for me", another 1/3 is "my account was hacked". The closest to the reason of my leaving is "There is nothing I can do", which is not true. I could do so much in WoW: I could level fishing to 600. I could get max rep with Gina Mudclaw. I could level up archeology. Hell with these, I could be really awesome and great by having the best battle minipet on the server yay!!! There wasn't a single option about "the non-trivial content became a twitch game" or "whatever I get will be inflated into baseline in a month". They don't even want to know about those who - you know - wanted to play an MMO. All they want to know how could they salvage those who want to play their storyline-comedy single player game that needs constant internet connection for DRM and as a bonus got a shared capital city with other players. We aren't simply out of the core audience anymore. We no longer exist in the eyes of Blizzard. We are not even a niche group for them.

I said that I will probably resubscribe on the next expansion to see new content. I probably won't. At the end of the questionaire there was a question about "do I plan to resubscribe". They didn't ask for a reason here or I'd write "because of your damn questionaire that can only imagine that one can leave because he is too dumb for even current WoW".

A "farewell gift" from WoW were Cheats and Kargim. The first was OK-ish, Kargim did 9K!!! DPS and died in the fire. However we couldn't kick him because his guildmate did not let it. Now what else can we do than boost him to more valor points? Misdirect the boss on him! After we did, his mage friend ran off and pulled the whole instance. He died and the swarm came on us. The 2 days old 90 tank held the whole instance and we 3-manned all
with the boss. So World of Warcraft: boost retards in piss-easy content.

PS: about an MMO where your actions has consequences, check out the nullsec warfare report of EVE Online. One of the larges alliance just lost their capital city to us.
And to avoid looking a fanboy: I was still 4 days away from being in the fleet that did it.

For EVE trade and industrial discussions join Goblinworks channel.
If you want to get into nullsec, go to the official forum recruitment thread and type the name of the alliance you seek into the search and start reading. I'm in TEST by the way.
Tuesday morning report: 178.3B (5.5 spent on main accounts, 4.8 spent on Logi/Carrier, 3.2 on Ragnarok, 2.7 on Rorqual, 2.4 on Nyx, 2.8 on Dread, 17.4 sent as gift)

"My Orca will be just as useful a year from now as it is now, the only way to lose it is to fly it to Rancer or something."

really?

enlighten me if I am mistaken but 1.5 years ago an Orca was the perfect boat for drug smuggling - then Incarna was released in June 2011 and now an Orca is one of the worst ships you could find for this task.

I guess the difference is that in WoW you have planned obsolescence (which means that everybody knows what he is getting into) whereas in EVE obsolescence is random and impossible to predict ("haha, look at those 10m SP you invested into drone skills - as of today your ship can't even use drones, trololol").

Challenge modes are tuned correctly, and you can't nerf PvP. We'll have to wait to see if they decide to nerf Challenge modes, but as things stand, they're a worthy cooperative puzzle (planning) and twitch (execution) challenge.

i havent had a close look at challenge modes. i dont even own Pandaland yet, not sure i will.

but it occured to me that if challenge modes wanted to remain relevant then gold, silver bronze etc would not remain a static level of perfermance, a fixed time, but instead be based upon world rankings.

ie gold right now might be 20 minutes but as more people learn the dungeon and get lower times gold may drop to 19m or 18m etc

so if you have a gold level run you know you are in the top X% of players.

But the constant news stream don't even let me forget the big picture: I optimize for nothing.

The "answer" is that your optimization helped you right now, and you can enjoy the fruits of your labor (or just the process of optimization) for X amount of always-finite time.

Sure, optimization in WoW is a bit "pointless" when you have no goal like heroic raiding, PvP rank, or being social. I am surprised you didn't note how the exact same applies to EVE - you nearly quit 1-2 months ago because you had no reason to continue playing. Now you do, and suddenly your pointless activities have meaning, just like that.

I'd say "called it" but... the hell?!Pandas were out at 25.09. Less than a month ago. Also I believe you had a beta key for buying D3. Plenty of time to see the content. What were you thinking? I'm curious.

@Anti - Fixed times allow groups to run an instance to the best of their ability and improve their performance. Anyone can get a gold as long as long as their twitch+tactics are good enough. If you base ranks on the top % of players then you limit the top medals to an optimal class combinations. Players that want to be the "best" get the leader boards for their target/recognition.

I thnk you're looking at WoW from the wrong perspective. You're looking at it from a what can I do now to benefit me in the long term.

You're right to say that what you do will be pointless in the long term but that doesn't make it pointless in the short term. While grinding and optimizing right now for won't mean a thing come the next expansion or even a couple of major patches later, it is relevant on the current toughest content.

What always made it a challenge before was trying to see how quick you could finish the content and get a world ranking. If you don't finish the content by patch time, it's likely that you were stuck on something and would need the patch and conversely if you did finish it before it nerfed you have the options to either optimize you're gear going into the next patch or to unsubscribe until the next major patch lands.

Mortal Kombat and Guild Wars 2 both have the "combo" element just like chess. Even hardcore raiding is about synergy and doing your job correct in the context of the fight and composition.

Also, the people who have managed top #1 in arena and were in the best guild who beaten PvE content or the people who recently got gold challenge mode on all dungeons will not be forgotten because their name is remembered. Not by Joe Sixpack because he doesn't play WoW, but Joe Sixpack doesn't know who Newton was either.

I agree that the Planned Obsolollesence of WoW is rather annoying, and the Devs now overdoing it with constant nerfs is even more grating.

You really start to wonder wether they actually consider their game worth playing themselves if they offer the 'skip button' so readily.

That being said, avoiding the gear-treadmill has always been a major reason for plenty of Twink players to twink - and why the devs hate Twinks so much (they do not overly care about newcomers, as e.g. constantly removing content and ever more Enchantable Heirlooms in PvP show).

(Came back to WoW for a month or two due to a gap in releases; I needed something to tide me over and WoW fit the bill)

The complaints about the dailies are that the rep grind is unreasonable and boring. You should be thrilled Gevlon that more are rallying against this.

Making gear and challenges obsolete doesn't bother me particularly. I did UD10 HMs back in the day and it was one of the most fun experiences I had in the game. You also proved with Undergeared how little gear makes a difference compared to player skill.

Blizzard have also expressed an interest in using the new scaling technology from challenge modes to possibly bring back older content at an appropriate level, which would completely avoid making content and gear obsolete.

In other news, I've greatly enjoyed parting morons with ridiculous amounts of gold since coming back (making ~100-150K per week), and I'm greatly enjoying all the complaining from the idiots and poor players about the BMAH.

Vial of the Sands continues to be an excellent profit-making machine for me as well. I'm selling them on the AH for 8-10K profit. Competition seems non-existent at this point as well, so I'll take full advantage of this while I can.

But - just as EVE proves - creating something lasting years is possible.

And what has been created that lasts years? Which ships are best at what? The best ways to gain ISK? Which Alliances are on top?

You can make a legitimate complaint that WoW has more planned obsolescence than EVE, if you prefer more static games (but apparently dislike the static ones that have been around for more than 20 years) instead of desiring to be challenged to come up with new approaches every patch. But the notion that your EVE "ideas" are going to last longer than WoW is just a fanciful delusion.

For one thing, last long for whom? Your Undergeared project is more than 3 years old now. That is an idea that (potentially) impacts 4+ million NA/EU players, and gets passed on directly by guild/raid leaders everywhere. I have not played WoW in over a year, and I still think about that project and carry the notion with me into any other MMO I play. Assuming ANY of your EVE ideas take off (have any of them thus far?), the maximum audience for your knowledge is... 400k. Probably less. Probably a lot less. If you are seeking longevity of ideas, you are seeking it in the wrong place.

@Azuriel: except in WoW you can't make any goals since EVERYTHING will be obsolated.

Like the Undergeared project? Like what you did in Wintergrasp? Like your work in The PuG?